Acer has issued a voluntary product recall notice for 22,000 Acer Aspire notebooks in the US, after it emerged that they could overheat and burn their owners.
Or maybe not.
The voluntary recall, kicked off in association with the US Consumer Product Safety Commission, follows a similar European recall back in October. …

How much power are they using in their microphones?

@Wize

letters and/or digits

The only power in the microphone circuit should be the tiny fluctuating voltage generated by the microphones transducer when you speak. There would never under any circumstances be enough current to melt plastic, or heat the wire up at all.

I can't even imagine how they would mess up a simple circuit like that so that it could short out and overheat. It just doesn't seem possible. Seems more likely to be a fault with the preamp or something... but even so... drawing enough energy to melt the laptop case would run the battery down pretty frickin fast. And the microphone would not work. You'd think someone would notice those things.

Mic Voltage

ttile

A capacitor microphone needs a polarising voltage to work, and a lappy may well have one as a small capacitor mic would be cheaper than a small moving coil one. If thisvoltage is taken straight from a power rail then a short circuit could indeed cause 'slight melting'.

Hey ... sir!

Overblown

Pics or it didn't happen.

A slight melting is a far different thing than meltED plastic. If the wire were to get really hot you'd smell the insulation burning off, notice the palm rest was really warm long before you'd left your hands on it for a period lengthy enough to get burned, and as the article mentioned nobody has been.

On the other hand it's nice to see a company ordering a recall before people do actually get hurt, too often the bottom line is will the cost of a recall be lower than bodily harm lawsuits and that is a bad PR move these days with urban myths entrenched in every other forum, let alone the truths of product failures.